We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.

Chill penury weighs down the heart itself; and though it sometimes be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.

It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man--the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse--the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in which it is embraced in sleep. I suppose it never happened to any one to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the sleeping state.

Now, it is a good sanitary principle, that what is curative is preventive.

Occupation was one of the pleasures of paradise, and we cannot be happy without it.

In our relations with the people around us, we forgive them more readily for what they do, which they can help, than for what they are, which they cannot help.